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5 days ago
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There is a longstanding Hollywood urban myth that the original 1987 Predator movie was inspired by a joke doing the rounds about Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky series. The idea was that after the Italian Stallion beat up Dolph Lundgren’s towering Soviet superman Ivan Drago in 1985’s Rocky IV, the only opponent he could fight next would be an alien. Supposedly, screenwriters Jim and John Thomas heard this jape and wrote Predator – which, after a few rewrites, a new lead (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and a change of title from their original spec script, became one of the most enduring sci-fi action films of the 1980s.
In truth, the timeline doesn’t add up. The Thomas brothers were already shopping their script around in 1983, long before Rocky IV hit cinemas, suggesting the “Rocky v alien” story is probably a post hoc myth. Yet the original film is such a perfect example of the brutally linear B-movie-esque 80s creature-feature that the story has been handed down through the decades – not because it’s true but because it feels as if it should be.
Predator is such a gloriously boneheaded concept that it ought to have spawned 20 increasingly terrible straight-to-video sequels starring progressively more ersatz versions of Schwarzenegger, each battling rubbery mandible-sporting foes against ever cheaper and more cheerful backdrops. Instead, we have been handed a series of pretty middling follow-ups: 1990’s Predator 2, the execrable Alien vs Predator films, Predators (2010) and The Predator (2018). These were never quite bad enough to achieve cult infamy, but were not good enough to justify anyone watching them again.
But this week we got a new trailer for Predator: Badlands, from director Dan Trachtenberg; this is the film-maker who has been quietly doing for the saga what Christopher Nolan once did for Batman, with the stripped-back, brilliant Prey (2022) and the gleefully deranged anime spin-off Predator: Killer of Killers earlier this year. It made me think of the old Rocky story, partly because the new film’s protagonist, teen predator Dek, sounds as if he has spent a few winters in Vladivostok. But more pertinently because this movie no longer resembles anything close to that original, beautifully simple premise. Its plotline is no longer “Rocky v alien (in the jungle)” but something more akin to “existentially conflicted space crustacean forms uneasy alliance with android twin on a sentient death planet while being hunted by his own species”.
This tells us everything we need to know about mainstream sci-fi film-making in the modern era. Star Wars was once an elevated matinee adventure serial with space monks and hero starfighters, but has morphed into a vast intergalactic genealogy project in which everyone’s grandad turned out to be evil. Terminator started out as the pulpy tale of a cyborg that came from the future to kill you, but wound up as a muddled loop of rebooted timelines in which the killer robots keep coming back, mostly to apologise for the last sequel. Alien began life as the story of something hellish from outer space that would cheerfully murder you from the inside, before somehow switching to demon androids quoting romantic poetry in candlelit laboratories.
By contrast, Predator has generally stayed true to its B-movie roots – though maybe no longer. Badlands does not seem to be about Predators facing off against humans – in fact, there don’t appear to be any humans in the film. It is ostensibly the tale of a young Yautja warrior who finds himself stranded on a planet full of monsters even worse than he is, with only a Weyland-Yutani android (Elle Fanning) to provide running commentary. It’s hard to imagine that we won’t learn more about the Predator race, their honour code and the reason they want to kill everything that moves. Finally, after nearly 40 years of thermal-vision carnage, this sci-fi saga is about to start universe-building – just like all its peers.
Then there is that Alien link. You would have thought Trachtenberg would be too smart a film-maker to find himself deep into creation myths and android philosophy. Rumours suggest Badlands is set so far in the future that the events of Disney+’s wonderfully cerebral series Alien: Earth will have zero connection here. But even so, it’s hard to imagine that some of that existential radiation won’t seep into the new movie: can it be a coincidence that the evil corporation is once again snooping around on a planet filled with the worst extraterrestrials in the cosmos? Because otherwise, what is the point of tying the two sagas together?
Perhaps, in the end, the real question isn’t whether Predator: Badlands can evolve – it’s whether we want it to. The original movie worked because it was pure cinematic testosterone, a 107-minute flex of Reagan-era id. Maybe we don’t need to know what the Yautja do at weekends, or whether they have a word for love. Perhaps the beauty of Predator was that it was never meant to grow up. If Trachtenberg’s film ends with our young extraterrestrial hero learning compassion, self-knowledge and the futility of endless conflict, that’s fine. But part of me will still be rooting for him to scream: “If it bleeds, we can kill it,” before punching an alien dragon to death.
